Sunday, December 4, 2016

Clash of Worldviews: The Meaning of Trumpism

MODERATOR: Good evening and welcome back to Clash of
Worldviews, the show in which we try to get to the bottom of big issues. You
may have heard that President-Elect Donald Trump is a charlatan and an ogre,
and that Hillary Clinton is crooked and phony. But Trump’s election has cast
doubt on so much of our conventional wisdom that we’re still wondering—as
though lost in a wasteland—just what the true meaning of Trump’s election might
be. To help answer that question, we’ve asked Adam Garnett, famed liberal
humanist and Hillary Clinton supporter, and Fred Gulpa, a Donald Trump
supporter and self-described member of the alt-right to be with us to discuss
the matter. Gentlemen, who would like to begin? What is Trumpism all
about?

ADAM: In a word, Trump is about himself, while his
supporters are about having a laugh at the country’s expense. They’re not
downtrodden, these older white working class folks; they’re just venting
because they’ve fared badly under globalization, they know the days of
exclusive white power or imperialism are over, and they mean to take the
country down with them. If they can’t rule any longer like they used to in the
first half of the last century, they’re going to pollute the discourse with
their vulgarity and send a bull into the china shop.

FRED: So “they’re not downtrodden,” but they’ve also “fared
badly under globalization”? Which is it, I wonder? You see how the elites can’t
even think straight? No wonder they were ripe for being humiliated by Trump and
by the rise of the alt-right!

ADAM: I meant that these Trumpists have benefited from
governmental support. They’re part of the middle class, but they’d like to blow
up the social system, thus committing collective suicide by voting against
their economic interest. Trump, in other words, isn’t an expression of revolt
against the powers that be. Instead, he’s a rogue power, an agent of anarchy.

FRED: Keep telling yourself that, Adam! Keep patting
yourself on the back. You’re one of the good guys, right? Not some useful idiot
to plutocrats.

ADAM: And who are you, Freddy? What vile hate speech will
you treat us to this evening? I can hardly wait to plug my ears.

FRED: Yeah, because you’re a feminized liberal who can’t
stomach the naked truth. You think Trump’s supporters are all morons and only
liberals have reason on their side. That’s where you’re wrong. Many of Trump’s
voters aren’t highly educated, but that doesn’t make them stupid. Just look
at what foolishness was wrought by Clinton’s neoliberal class of professionals:
they’re the Ivy Leaguers but they got it all wrong. Their polls, their history
lessons, their self-serving analyses were so many paper tigers squashed by the
juggernaut Trump. You think Hillary Clinton deserved to win, because she was
the more rational and responsible candidate. That’s what that euphemism was
about: Trump supposedly lacked “the demeanor to be president.” But you know
what Hillary Clinton lacked? An honest bone in her body. She couldn’t speak the
unpopular truth to the public and she lost because hardly anyone trusted that
she would change the United States for the better.

ADAM: And what will Trump do? Wave his magic wand and make
American great again? Is that supposed to be some profound truth he told?

FRED: Trump doesn’t speak in fancy academic double-talk. I’ll
grant you that. His language is seldom precise, but the essence of his diagnosis
was highly negative and thus accurate. Trump’s view of America’s standing in
the world is apocalyptic, as even the Democrats pointed out. Maybe Trump
exaggerates for rhetorical effect, but his main point is that the United States
isn’t doing well on the whole. That’s the truth that Hillary Clinton couldn’t
touch with a ten foot pole, because she had to own Obama’s legacy. The public no
longer respects the system, they were disappointed by Obama who ran falsely as
a change candidate, and they wanted a leader from outside the corrupt establishment
who would at least have a fighting chance of effecting radical change.

ADAM: Who is supposed to benefit from Trump’s
administration? Surely you don’t mean the older blue collar whites who have
been misled by Republicans for decades. Surely you’re aware that the
Republicans have used social wedge issues to stir up animosities and compel
these folks to vote against their economic interest. Surely you understand that
trickle-down economics just further enriches the top one percent while everyone
else falls further behind, that a smaller government with fewer taxes gets out
of the way only of giant corporations which are already as powerful as some
entire countries, but that the little guy may need government support if he’s
going to survive globalization.

FRED: But he’s notgoing to survive globalization.
Again, that’s the sort of dark truth you don’t want to hear. The system that
maintains the economic status quo is rigged against him. That’s the system that
Obama and Hillary defend as the technocratic managers they are. That’s the
system we want Trump to destroy.

ADAM: And your street smarts are supposed to enable you to
divine the contents of Trump’s mind? When you psychically peer into its depths,
how do you get past the boatload of mental disorders to discover his true
intentions?

FRED: Oh, is Trump unfit to attend one of your dinner
parties? Is he too coarse for polite company? And that would be the company of
smug liberal professionals like you, the company of system managers and consumers
who boast that they’re “progressive” when the system they’re upholding is
impoverishing billions, enslaving or exterminating all nonhuman animal species,
and destroying the planet.

ADAM: When did alt-right conservatives become tree-huggers?

FRED: I’m not opposed to eating meat. But I am disgusted
with Big Agriculture. We should be upstanding men and women who earn what we
have. If you want to eat meat, go out and hunt; be sustainable in your way of
life. Don’t be a sissy who whines when you discover there are bad chemicals in
the plastic-covered beef you buy at the supermarket.

ADAM: So now you want a sustainable
way of life? What happened to Trump blowing up the system?

FRED: There’s no contradiction there: it’s the global system
of crony capitalism that’s unsustainable, so it has to be destroyed to give us
a chance to put something else in its place.

ADAM: And do you really think Trump will destroy the system
that he admits to having gamed for decades to enrich himself?

FRED: I’m not a psychic or a prophet. I don’t know what Trump
will do as president. But we’re not talking about Trump. We’re talking about
Trumpism. The meaning of Trump is that he rose to power on a wave of resentment
against the neoliberal social order.

ADAM: Resentment against social progress, you mean. Trump
ascended thanks to a global backlash fuelled by churlish contempt for
foreigners who threaten whites’ narcissistic, nationalist delusions of
grandeur. You don’t want to share power with blacks, gays, or Muslims, so you
empowered a regressive champion, like they’re doing in Europe.

FRED: Minorities and women have played the race card and
identity politics for several decades now, but when white men stand up for
themselves they’re being racists and misogynists? That’s a tiresome double
standard.

ADAM: Yeah, it’s double because there are two things there.
Blacks were literally slaves under whites, and women were oppressed in
patriarchies around the world for millennia. White men benefited from those
inequities, so now they’re not just “standing up for themselves”; they’re trying
to reinstitute imperialist power structures.

FRED: Your beef then is with nature. You think we progress
by departing from what’s natural, but that bit of liberal humanism is as delusional
as belief in a sky-god with a white beard. Nature is filled with inequalities.
Men aren’t the same as women, and races aren’t culturally or even biologically
all the same. These are some more of those dark truths that terrify liberals.

ADAM: Races aren’t biologically the same, eh? So we’re back
to the quackery that drove fascism in the Second World War?

FRED: Tell me, then, why would
the races be biologically the same? What would make them identical, overriding
the genes that cause different skin colours, for example? You sound like Isaac
Newton who assumed God must be holding the orbits in place, preventing planets
from falling into the sun.

ADAM: Liberals don’t think races and sexes are identical.
Obviously men and women have different physical characteristics, and blacks and
whites, for example, have different skin colours. The point, rather, is that
all people should be held in equal regard, the physical differences between
them being irrelevant to their human rights.

FRED: That’s the liberal myth alright. But there are no
human rights, you know. That’s a fiction we’ve been telling ourselves in the
modern world, to replace the old religious stories that rationalized how we
thought the world should be. You may prefer to treat men and women the same,
but that civic religious dogma of yours is currently backfiring. When men treat
women the same way they treat men, for example, that’s unromantic. Even if
women are too politically correct or clouded by feminist platitudes to call metrosexual
men on it, they won’t appreciate that sort of equal treatment. It’s boring and
unsatisfying to them. That’s why their soap opera daydreams and romance novels
tell a very different story. A woman wants a world to correspond to her
fantasies in which a heroic man sweeps her off her feet.

ADAM: I’m pretty sure women have been clamouring also for
equal pay for equal work.

FRED: Sure they have, because like children they don’t know
what’s best for them. It’s in their best interest to be led by strong men. They
may think they want to do men’s dirty work in business and politics and the
like, and perhaps some women are exceptions and that’s what they truly want.
But many feminists are lying to themselves and only pretending to be content
with modernity. And I note again the shadiness of this talk of equality: the
flip side of human rights is our domination of other species, which will lead
to our downfall.

ADAM: Authoritarian men like Trump may prefer sheepish
women, just as white bullies may presume that the white race has a manifest
destiny to rule the planet while so-called inferior races are doomed to
languish under the whip. But these are atrocious stereotypes, not dark
empirical truths as you would have us believe.

FRED: They’re truer to nature than is your liberal
humanistic happy-talk! You have to be blind and deaf in a bubble of political
correctness to think the races are all the same. Think of races as breeds. We
breed dogs or horses and we prize pure breeds, the ones that best display the
characteristics of their type. A mutt, by contrast, is a dog with mixed blood
and muddled traits that don’t allow it to excel in a particular environment.
Natural selection works the same way, so when we interbreed as humans, we
pollute our gene pool and lose the traits and skills required to excel or even
to survive.

ADAM: There’s just one problem with that bit of eugenics:
natural selection doesn’t work the way same way on our species, because we’re
not mere animals. Animals are slave to their programming, but people are
self-aware and autonomous. That’s why blacks can be enslaved for generations,
but an African-American can still be educated and can rise to become President
of the United States. Likewise, a woman such as Hillary Clinton can study at Yale
and Oxford and become as qualified as any man for that same position. As
individuals we can defy our programming and our “blood,” and that’s the source
of our equality: we have the equal potential to excel as free beings, liberated
from the natural laws that rule over the animal kingdom. But your throwback
rhetoric would have certain out-groups regress and be treated as animals so
they can be conquered by a so-called exceptional class, by the “power elites.”

FRED: You establishment liberals need to listen more closely
to the progressives you’ve ignored. Bernie Sanders and leftists such as Thomas
Frank, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi recognize that there are power elites
and plutocrats who run so-called democracies behind the scenes. I agree that
humans have greater self-control than animals. But our freedom isn’t
supernatural and it can be overcome by the environment. Look at what happened
since the advent of Neolithic farming: we became sedentary and formed unequal,
hierarchical societies—regardless of the culture or style of politics. Democracy
is based on the assumption that voters have equal rights, but the ancient
Greeks understood that democracies devolve, because demagogues arise, whip up
mass resentments, and establish a tyranny of the majority. So instead of one
from many, as it says on the American seal, we have inequality from equality. The
clash between Democrats and Republicans this election cycle was between
different economic classes vying for power, but because Trump is a far superior
demagogue, he was able to energize his base and get them to vote for radical
change. Despite Clinton’s superb self-control and intellectual heft, her voters
were uninspired by her tired rhetoric. So where then was our vaunted equality?
Our nonrational side got the better of us, and the more beastly class—the white
older males and blue collar workers—took political power from the demoralized
and decadent millennials and liberal professionals.

ADAM: So what’s your solution to this imperfect state of
modern democracy? Elect the most egregious demagogue possible on a wing and a
prayer that you just might be left standing after he hurls us all into the
apocalypse?

FRED: You still don’t understand. The apocalypse is all
around us; it’s been there since the beginning. It’s the state of nature. All human efforts are taken on a wing and
prayer. We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re supernatural agents, free
from natural processes so that we can forge our path in the wilderness. And
being the hypocrites we are, we condemn out-groups who are likewise as deluded
by their myths which are unfamiliar to us. You say the alt-right demonizes
minorities and other groups, but Hillary Clinton was quick to demonize the
alt-right as a “basket of deplorables.” Instead of exercising our autonomy and
empathizing with others, we circle the wagons, applauding our tribe and howling
at our opponents—just like a troop of monkeys. Instead of listening to what the
alt-right is saying, liberals cherry-pick unflattering quotations from this or
that website, and thus still don’t understand what the election was really
about and why they lost to Trumpism.

ADAM: I know what the alt-right is about. It’s the
Frankenstein monster created by the Republican establishment, including Fox
News; it’s the set of wedge issues that kept the Republican base in line until
the Great Recession unleashed the Tea Party which morphed into the birther
movement, joining forces with a thousand conspiracy cliques on the internet,
whether it be Alex Jones’ Infowars, the 911 Truthers, the pickup artists, the
videogamers, and even the white supremacists. The alt-right is a form of
conservatism that speaks to the underclass rather than to “the establishment”
or to the wealthy managers of the Republican infrastructure. Instead of the
neoliberal, globalist myths peddled by the New York Times and the like—the
myths of the free market and of entrepreneurialism, upward mobility, and the
need to get the government off our backs—you have the more vulgar myths that
sprouted in the dark alleyways of the internet such as 4chan and Reddit.

FRED: Your analysis is incomplete, because the backlash
against neoliberalism is global. The internet merely allows for freer
communication. So we had Occupy Wall Street and then the Arab Spring, Brexit, the
ascent of Putin, China, and Iran, and a rightwing insurgence across Europe. And
now we have Trumpism. We use the internet to find the ideas that most interest
us, but we mustn’t confuse the messenger with the message. The internet doesn’t
cause hostility to free-market
capitalism, globalization, and democracy; chat rooms and blogs, Facebook and
Twitter merely bring that uprising to the fore. To understand Trumpism, you
have to recognize the fault of liberalism, but you’re too invested in your
myths to scrutinize them.

ADAM: You’re muddying the waters. Liberalism isn’t
responsible for globalization, for so-called free-market economics, or for the
libertarian frontier culture. Liberalism is just the modern faith that humans
are obligated to be godlike, because we enlightened Westerners discovered that
a nonhuman god is irrelevant and probably nonexistent. We’re free as
individuals from the religious dogmas and traditions that oppressed the masses
for most of our history. We have the right to self-determination, to find our
own way to be happy as long as we don’t interfere with other people’s equal
right to the same. The U.S. Declaration of Independence is a classic liberal document.

FRED: Sure, that’s where liberalism starts, in the ideal of
self-determination, because the rational individual must take over for the old
gods we’ve left behind. But the institutions of capitalism and democracy arise
from that ideal. “Let the individual sellers and buyers select their prices and
what to produce or purchase.” “Let the voters choose their political
representatives.” We invest power in all of us, because we worship ourselves
after the death of God. But look what happens to liberal economies and
governments. Monopolies, oligopolies, and plutocracies emerge, and the wealthy
exercise their unequal power to entrench their privileges, manipulating the
laws to their advantage and going round and round the revolving door between
the private and public sectors so that the majority falls far behind with
stagnant wages and no political power. And when developing countries adopt the
neoliberal Washington Consensus, we have a global competition and a race to the
bottom for the sake of private profit, further hurting the chances of millions
of Americans to “find their own way to be happy.”

ADAM: But the irony here is appalling! The so-called
Washington Consensus was established mainly by Republicans. Free market
ideology grew out of right-wing, libertarian think-tanks.

FRED: Then how do you explain Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade
deal or his repeal of Glass-Steagall?

ADAM: Clinton had to triangulate to outmaneuver the
Republican-led congress.

FRED: No, that’s a pitiful excuse. The Clintons and other
Democratic leaders are one with establishment Republicans in their
neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is just a name for the bipartisan consensus that’s
based on the sacrosanct classic liberal ideal of individual freedom. Bill
Clinton was indoctrinated into neoliberalism under Carroll Quigley at
Georgetown University, subsequently influencing his wife and thus another
leader of the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama adopted the cutthroat,
careerist culture of neoliberalism at Harvard Law School and was further
indoctrinated by the neoliberal establishment figures he had picked for some
reason to fill out his economics cabinet (I’m referring to Jaimie Rubin,
Geithner, and Summers). What do these Democratic leaders have in common? They’re
fatalistic about the powers that be, so that these neoliberal Democrats
conclude that only incremental, not radical social change is possible. They
take a neutral, “scientific,” hands-off, “no-drama” perspective on world
affairs, seeing themselves as mere technocratic managers, because the system is
already in place and functioning as it should. The system in question is
capitalistic and democratic: it spread from Britain in the Industrial
Revolution to the United States and then to other parts of the world.
Liberalism was almost defeated by Nazi and Soviet ideologies, but the West won
out and the American way of life is supposed to stand now as the goal for all humanity,
the United States being the indispensible, exceptional nation that can do no
wrong. That’s what all the American power elites believe on both the left and the
right. Except they’re wrong and there’s both domestic and foreign revolts
against neoliberalism, that is, against the American forms of capitalism and
democracy which enrich the few at the expense of the many and which even play
out as stage-managed hoaxes. A 2014 study showed that America is
plutocratic, not democratic, because most voters’ interests never get
translated into public policy; their representatives heed the directives only
of their wealthy donors and patrons.

ADAM: Well, allow me to introduce an alternative
interpretation. Again, it’s rich hearing this radical progressivism from an
extreme right-winger. This looks to me rather like a cynical act of rebranding.
After Obama was elected, the Republicans tried being friendlier to minorities,
to address the demographic realities which must be unsettling to proponents of the
trusty Southern Strategy. But that didn’t work, because the Tea Party took over
the Republican Party, casting out the moderates and leaving Republicans with
Trump whose crudities can’t be papered over. So there’s a new strategy: excuse
alt-right radicalism by blaming it on the left, by pretending Trump is just like
Bernie Sanders.

FRED: Your academic labels are unhelpful since they have
you looking at the trees so you can’t see the whole forest. Progressives and
the alt-right do have something in
common: they’re both radical! They’ve both been shut out of the mainstream American
discourse, so now the corporate media are scrambling to find labels to box us
in, to normalize and co-opt us, to shut down the revolution and protect their privileged
positions. Trump was elected precisely because of his vulgarity, because out of
all the nominees and candidates, he was seen to have by far the greatest chance
of being a genuine outsider who will destroy the establishment, who will drain
the swamp, as he put it. That was the aim of the voters who mattered most this
election, to subvert the neoliberal social order, to embarrass the power elites
but also to rollback globalization, free trade, and the culture of stifling
political correctness.

ADAM: Good luck with all that! The most likely outcome of
this revolt will be its signaling that America has already declined past the
point of easy retrieval. Cynics are lashing out but they have no idea how to
solve our real problems, so the election of Trump is a symptom, not a cure for
our disordered culture. Trump will probably succeed only in humiliating all Americans. At least he’ll entertain
us, the way the violinists kept playing as the Titanic sank.

FRED: And when progressives are evidently so demoralized
that they speak of the end of American greatness, you know you’ve got them
beat.

ADAM: I’m just observing that this rightwing backlash
against globalization is futile, because the heroes you’re electing, whether in
Britain or here in the U.S., are actually bumbling imbeciles or charlatans who
can’t govern a child’s birthday party let alone a superpowerful nation. What
happens when a horde of troglodytes storms the battlements? Does it create a
shining new world order or is nature using that manifest barbarism to wipe us
all out? Sorry, but a businessman with the early advantages Trump had, who went
bankrupt several times and is now hiding his true net worth by not releasing
his tax returns doesn’t inspire much confidence that even if he could run the
country the way he ran his businesses, our fate would be in good hands. But don’t
worry: when Trump wrecks our economy the way he wrecked his businesses, it will
be the Democrats who pick up the pieces. And bless the short memory of
troglodytes, since that will prevent them from feeling the shame they ought to
feel for having disgraced themselves with this reckless course of action. Indeed,
they’ll have disgraced themselves before their white male forebears who were
the classic liberals of early modernity, who were ingenious and highly creative
renaissance men. Donald Trump is no renaissance man.

MODERATOR: That will have to be the last word for now. I’d
like to thank our guests for their stimulating exchange on the meaning of
Trumpism. Tune in next for a reading of the tea leaves of Trump’s latest tweet.

14 comments:

When the Spanish and other Europeans came to the Americas, they found the native people to be living quite a primitive life. How do you explain the technological difference between these two groups? Were the Native Americans artificially "kept down" by someone prior to the arrival of Europeans? We use science to determine that we are damaging the planet, should we also use science to determine if there are indeed racial differences? Our reluctance to do this is not helping anyone. Telling certain groups, that if it weren't for them being "kept down" for so long, they too would have designed the ships that have flown into space, might be nothing but a fairytale. One of the common cultural explanations for high Ashkenazi intelligence, is that they were discriminated against, which made them have to try harder. If it worked for them, why not others? We could structure society in a way that works for people, regardless of IQ. Instead we say that everyone has an equal chance at becoming a computer scientist, as long as they have access to the same education. This has not worked out well so far. Since you mention skin color, there are many very dark skinned Indian people in my area, and most of them are successful technology professionals. I wonder why their dark skin isn't preventing them from succeeding in this field?

Well, you're assuming that an increase in technological power over nature counts as progress so that any race that excels in that department is superior to any that's technologically weak. As far as I can tell, the scientific case for an imminent, human-made ecological catastrophe puts the kibosh on that line of argument. On the contrary, technological advances may spell our doom, so wisdom may truly have lain in a more sustainable way of life such as you find among the "weaker" races who live more harmoniously with nature.

The question is whether the sort of intelligence needed for high-tech advances should be the rule for all human endeavours, so that we can write off any culture or racial genotype that hinders in that respect. I hardly think this is obviously so. Even if we confine ourselves to the evolutionary context, so that we could say a more powerful race, which out-competes weaker ones, is more functional than those that aren't ravenous for (unsustainable) technological developments, the evaluative conclusion about racial "supremacy" doesn't follow, because of the naturalistic fallacy.

I haven't made up my mind on all of these matters, but it's a pretty obvious rebuttal for which so-called racial realists should be prepared.

Still, I agree that political correctness may well be preventing scientists from exploring racial differences between humans. I'm just pointing out that scientists would be entitled to speak only of such _differences_; evaluating them is a nonscientific matter.

"Well, you're assuming that an increase in technological power over nature counts as progress so that any race that excels in that department is superior to any that's technologically weak." I'm curious how you came to that conclusion? I don't believe that IQ alone make people "superior." The technological progress prior to the Industrial Revolution, is not responsible for our current environmental problems. The mass burning of fossil fuels is to blame for most of that. It is interesting that one group of people accepts the scientific basis for global warming, but are made uncomfortable with scientific conclusions on race/IQ. The other group accepts the scientific basis for race/IQ, but are made uncomfortable about climate change. It's these things that make me pessimistic for the future. Denying reality will get us nowhere.

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." ~ Ayn Rand

I took the point of your comment to be that it would "help" if we used science to explain the racial causes of vast technological differences between societies. It's not just that "primitive" societies are "kept down" (oppressed), you say. There may be relevant hard-wired differences.

For the counterargument I raise in my response to be irrelevant, you would have to agree that scientific study of racial differences would help also in showing why the sort of high intelligence needed for runaway technological advances is bad rather than good, and thus why we should be more like the primitive societies. You seemed to be assuming that all societies should want to have spaceships and so forth. My point was just that even if scientists showed there are significant racial differences in intelligence, science would be neutral on whether the differences or their cultural effects are good or bad.

The other point would be that culture (religion, etc) rather than race may account for the society's level of technology. The Native Americans would have preferred a hunter-gatherer way of life, not the sedentary one needed for large-scale economies that support scientific and technological advances.

"My point was just that even if scientists showed there are significant racial differences in intelligence, science would be neutral on whether the differences or their cultural effects are good or bad." Well if a certain average IQ is required, even to maintain anything close to civilization, then it's hardly irrelevant. I don't see too many people rushing to live in tee-pee's and mud huts, including yourself. Modern Native Americans seem to quite enjoy living in proper houses, and wearing clothes other than animal skins. The reality you espouse on this blog was made possible by technological advancement, whether good or bad. Primitive life leads to superstition.

"Objectivists contend that Rousseauian romanticism of primitive life became the foundation for the 1960s' counterculture and New Left, which Rand vehemently opposed. Two specific groups that Rand controversially accused of being primitive "savages" were Native Americans and Arabs. Rand also outlined her broader anti-primitive views in various speeches, interviews, and in her book Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

It's certainly true that most people don't want to live as primitives. Unfortunately, if the question is whether a certain way of life is objectively best, it's fallacious to appeal to popularity. If we want to say that one race is superior because it's most effective in achieving the way of life that most people actually want, we're entitled to conclude that that race is only subjectively superior. The evaluation would depend on our actual wants. We don't actually want to live in teepees and we prefer the modern luxuries.

What this overlooks is the possibility that we don't know ourselves well at all, that most people are utterly deluded or infantilized and distracted so that they haven't a moment to spare on philosophical reflection. Not only might they be wrong about the meaning of life, but if they thought about it more, they'd see that even their subjective evaluations are inconsistent and thus worthless; they have the potential to see that capitalism (the unleashing of vice, the worship of money, etc), for example, might not be sustainable so that it's actually in their best subjective interest to go more primitive.

Again, I'm only raising this as a possible counterargument. I've written on both sides of these issues, exploring the options. For example, I've argued that the aesthetic dimension (creativity that avoids monstrosity) is the basis for an objective meaning of life.

Primitive life does lead to superstition. Unfortunately, so does high-tech modernity. Just look at all the myths and delusions tumbling down in the avalanche of corporate advertisements which bury consumers. We're all fundamentally irrational, as cognitive science shows, so that's the true source of superstition. In the long run, if science and technology are self-destructive, because they reveal a horrifying universe that saps the will to live from most people and that destroys the ecosystem and the planet's capacity to support life, the superstitions sustaining more primitive cultures might turn out to be rational. That is, these delusions would be instrumentally necessary noble lies that sustain the greater good of higher life.

Why would sentient life be worth sustaining even at the cost of our dignity? In my view, it's not. So we have three levels here, two of which pertain to the deluded lifestyle. You have (1) those folks whose delusions are self-destructive (arguably, the modern, American-led hyper-consumers), (2) those whose delusions are life-preserving (primitives, anarchists, environmentalists, etc), and (3) enlightened individuals who are relatively free of delusions at the cost of their happiness and perhaps their sanity. Sentient life is worth preserving because of the potential for enlightenment. That's the greatest good, not pleasure or happiness or power. But ironically, what enlightened individuals may choose to do is to war with nature (replacing the monstrosity of wilderness with artificial creativity), which requires keeping the mass of humanity deluded and thus useful as a megamachine in that enterprise.

I agree with you there. Ayn took most of her philosophy from Aristotle and Nietzsche. I like to reference Ayn when discussing these things, as most people have little if any knowledge of the other two.

A very interesting article indeed. I hadn't heard of this author or of Earnest Becker either, whom Schumaker quotes in another article. We're all certainly on the same page about the insanity of what's taken for psychological normality in the West, except that these authors are psychologists who said it better and years earlier. Becker's theory of heroism is also intriguing. Thanks very much for the link.

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In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.